Elsa O’Brien López

Intonation is a very important tool to convey meaning in the English language. For several reasons, this area receives little attention in the ESL classrooms. Some researchers argue it cannot be learned in a structured setting at all. Looking at how babies learn pronunciation naturally can help adult learners.

Since they are in the womb, babies are already listening to what’s going on in the outside world.  Evidence indicates that babies are listening to pitch movement as early as week 30 in utero. In fact, tone is one of the first areas to be acquired by children.  But in the classrooms of English as a second language, the learning of tone tends to be somewhat neglected and both teachers and students seem more interested in the mastering of word-level pronunciation.

This is understandable as English is not a phonetic language and, very often, words are not pronounced and written in the same way. For this reason, learners can fear not being understood and will want to make sure they are pronouncing words the right way.

However, suprasegmental pronunciation -tone, stress, pitch and rhythm- also plays a key role in being understood. Intonation can carry a great part of the meaning of a sentence: it will be a cue as to how to respond to our interlocutor. Tone changes depending on whether the information shared is new or known by both speakers. It shows the speaker’s mood and it is different when we ask a question, depending on whether we’re looking for a ‘yes/no’ answer or for more detailed information. Even the number of pauses in a sentence can sometimes change its meaning.  

The English language is not as flexible as other languages. For example, in Spanish a change in word order will indicate the relevance of a part of a sentence over the rest. As this is generally not possible in English, intonation becomes a very important communication tool.

How difficult is learning pronunciation for adults?

Achieving native-like pronunciation takes a greater effort from adults than children or teenagers. In fact, linguist  Jennifer Jenkins believes that segmental pronunciation cannot be taught to adults in the classroom.

A majority of a language’s elements are hard to learn explicitly. For this reason, Jenkins argues that tone, stress and rhythm can only be acquired through extensive exposure to the language outside the classroom.

Learning like a baby.

Paying attention to a baby’s language learning process can help adults acquire a language in a more natural way. Babies focus on intonation first, and little by little, this will help them break down long strings into individual words with a meaning.

On the other hand, adults learning in a classroom, will be guided through the process. A teacher will accompany them pointing out words and the context in which they are used. The acquisition of a second language is bound to be very different from a baby’s learning of a mother tongue.

It is understandable that adults learning an additional language will rely on their analytical skills and their knowledge of a first language. But learning should also be approached like babies do, using our right brain.

When only focusing on imitating the intonation contour, adult learners were not paying attention to other linguistic aspects. Like babies they were using the musical ability of their right hemisphere.

Researchers Ioup and Tansomboom (1987)  observed that adult students carrying out a pronunciation task were able to reproduce native-like -or close to- melodic contours when asked to hum. When only focusing on imitating the intonation contour, learners were not paying attention to other linguistic aspects. They were using the musical ability of their right hemisphere in the same way that babies do as they haven’t acquired yey other analytical, reasoning and meta-language skills that adults possess.

Here are some tips for adults who want to learn pronunciation in a more holistic and natural way:

• Pay attention to context. Adults (especially beginners) tend to do bottom-up processing when learning a language so they need to have understood every element of the sentence to get the overall meaning. Context and your interlocutor’s body language and tone will give a lot of clues to help interpret the message. 

Young children process languages top-down, which allows them to get a grasp despite not knowing the meaning of every word. Intonation plays a big role in this kind of processing.

• Get intense and frequent exposure to the language you are learning outside the classroom. Music is an excellent way of gaining exposure at the beginning when watching a series or listening to the radio might still be too demanding.
  
• Pay attention, or not. We don’t always need to be paying full attention to what we’re listening to. Having the radio on in the background for a few hours while we are doing some housekeeping will help get used to the language’s rhythm, tone and stress. 
  
  The emphasis we place on each part of the word when pronouncing it is called stress. In French, the stress falls on the last syllable, in Spanish on the penultimate in 80% of the cases, while in English there’s a high variety. At the age of 9 months, babies can already tell what words belong to their language because of word stress even though they may have not been paying explicit attention and do not know the meaning.

• Sing. Ioup and Tansomboom observed during the humming test that adults can be as good as babies when divorcing tone from language. Knowing the lyrics won’t be the priority in this case, although it can also help to try and imitate the singer’s pronunciation while reading them.